Arthur Salm: AstroTurf gets a makeover

Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
(Pause)
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

But we all knew, exactly, what that iconic conversation in “The Graduate” was about: superficiality, pretense, hypocrisy … phoniness. It was the ’60s, and everything that was a lie could be embodied in that single word, that overarching concept: plastic.

And nothing could be phonier, more of an insult to all that was natural, more of a slap in the face to the Earth, than AstroTurf. It first achieved fame - and notoriety - in 1966, when it was installed as the playing surface for the field under the then-new Astrodome in Houston: not enough natural light came through to keep the grass alive. AstroTurf was soon marketed as a futuristic improvement on the real thing. It comes from NASA, or at least, the city where NASA is! You don’t have to water it! You don’t have to fertilize it! You don’t have to trim it! And it looks and feels just like grass!

Well, it looked kind of, sort of, more or less like something like grass, if it was night and there were no street lights directly in front of your house. And it felt like … let’s just say that if you were blindfolded and someone put your hand on some AstroTurf, “grass” wouldn’t be your first guess. You probably wouldn’t even have a first guess. It didn’t feel like anything associated with the real world. The only thing you’d be able to say about it for sure was that it was something fake, something cheesy, something… plastic.

It didn’t help AstroTurf’s image that it was soon cut up into doormat-size rectangles and sold as … doormats. They were an affront, is what they were. Like, this guy is under the impression that not only am I so stupid that I think his plastic lawn is real, but I’ll believe he’s  got four square feet of living turf right here at his front door, too.

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Worse, artificial turf nearly ruined baseball. Teams ripped out their green, natural fields and installed AstroTurf or some competitive equivalent, throwing the delicate balance of the game just enough out of whack, out of true, to rob it of a good chunk of its charm. Artificial turf was a plague.

But the worm - which you’d think wouldn’t stand a chance encased in plastic - somehow turned. Baseball started abandoning the soulless, plastic-carpeted, multi-use stadiums for smaller venues, true ballparks with real live grass. Fewer and fewer homeowners seemed to be installing the satanic stuff. The plague receded.

Now artificial turf is back. And just in time.

Because it doesn’t matter how plastic, fakey, phony, insincere, ersatz or cheesy you may or may not think it looks; in this day, in this age, in this place, artificial turf in a front yard makes one hell of a lot more sense, and it’s two hells of a lot more ecologically responsible than squandering tens of thousands of gallons of water every year every year to maintain grass in a desert. Oh, and by the way, there’s a drought.

(A number of homes in my neighborhood have xeriscaped their front yards, which we did almost a decade ago. It takes some work to keep up, but not as much as it takes to keep grass from becoming a prairie of knee-high weeds. Water? I estimate I use around five percent of what I poured on the lawn.)

But a lot of (stubborn) people just like the look and the feel of grass; they’re used to it. I happen to believe that since we’re in that desert, drought-tolerant, Mediterranean foliage looks more natural and thus better than grass, but that’s a matter of taste.

If you must have that look, my taste, these days, runs to artificial turf. (It has improved — just ask LaDainian Tomlinson.) Several homes in my neighborhood have gone that route. And you know what? They don’t have to water it! They don’t have to fertilize it! They don’t have to trim it! And it looks and feels (kind of) like grass!

Key line: They don’t have to water it.

Maybe Benjamin should have gone into plastics after all. Hell, maybe he did.

Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

Tags: astroturf, grass, lawns, SDNN, Water

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 7:42 am and is filed under Columns, Lifestyle, Water. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.